SmartLabs has signed a 140,000-square-foot lease to convert the third floor of the CambridgeSide mall into lab space. This addition increases SmartLabs’ Greater Boston footprint by 75%. It also provides fractionalized access to lab spaces and will enable programs of all sizes to move their discoveries to clinical trials under one platform. It prevents construction waste and is environmentally and fiscally responsible.

We are excited to bring our advanced capabilities to CambridgeSide and to expand our national network of labs and manufacturing centers that will scale up and scale out personalized medicine and other novel therapies, said Amrit Chaudhuri, CEO and co-founder of SmartLabs in a statement.

Initially, New England Development planned to convert the space into offices but shifted its focus due to remote work. They hope to land a tenant or two soon at 20 CambridgeSide, a 10-story, 365,000-square-foot life sciences complex set to be built at the mall by late 2023.

We are seeing a little bit of a pickup now,” Douglass Karp, president of New England Development, told the Boston Business Journal. “It’s not back to the furious pace it might have been 12 to 18 months ago, but we’re getting interest in 20 CambridgeSide and we’re excited about that, and looking to land a tenant or two there sooner rather than later.

The workplace actual property marketplace withinside the Boston location can be worse, thinking about the upheaval of the pandemic.

The lab marketplace, on the alternative hand, could not be hotter.

It’s no hyperbole to mention there is no lab area to be located in Cambridge. Real property organization Collier’s research confirmed precisely a 0.0% emptiness price withinside the town for the lab area in 1/3-sector 2021. The image is not tons distinctive on the alternative facet of the Charles: Boston’s lab emptiness price turned to 0.3%.

Demand for lab areas turned already developing progressively earlier than the pandemic, with Boston-Cambridge displaying the very best fees in step with square foot nationally. The fitness disaster best improved the call for, cementing Greater Boston’s role because of the industry’s vicinity to be.

Take any other belongings to report, this one from CBRE, which checked out lifestyles and technological know-how tendencies for 2021: In the beyond 3 years alone, via Q3 2021, Boston’s overall lab area has doubled, including a kind of 20 million square feet. The San Francisco Bay Area has barely extra lifestyle sciences jobs than Greater Boston — 129,000 in comparison with 104,000 — however Boston has the best percentage of specialty lifestyles technological know-how doctorate ranges of any place, in line with CBRE.

Even extra telling for the future, Boston-location lifestyles sciences businesses received $10.7 billion in assignment capital withinside the first 9 months of 2021, approximately as tons as the following regions — San Francisco and San Diego — combined. In fact, precisely one-1/3 of all lifestyles sciences assignment capital nationally went to Boston-location businesses.

At 42.2 million square feet, Boston has effortlessly the biggest lifestyles sciences and lab hub nationally, and fees suggest a call is not approximately to ease up. At extra than $ninety in step per square foot, an area in Greater Boston is pricier than everywhere else, but the emptiness price in Eastern Massachusetts is likewise the bottom at, in CBRE’s math, simply 1.1%.

Lab conversions
Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY), and Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA) are a number of the massive gamers that signed foremost workplace and lab rentals in 2021. Looking ahead, extra than 10 million square feet of recent lifestyles technological know-how area is beneath neath creation withinside the Boston location — any other range wherein the place is some distance out of percentage in comparison with its peers. San Francisco comes closest, however, has simply one-1/3 of that range.

It’s no surprise that 3.2 million square feet of different area withinside the Boston location is being transformed into labs. Colliers expects Somerville and Watertown, herbal extensions of the Cambridge submarket, to peer some distance extra increase ahead.

“It is obvious that Somerville could be converted through new lifestyles technological know-how development,” Colliers said.

When searching at conventional workplace areas, the Boston location’s numbers appear pretty distinctive — though now no longer so out of line with different foremost markets throughout the pandemic.

The Boston marketplace had a workplace emptiness price of 15.8% withinside the 2nd sector of 2021, the maximum latest pronounced through Colliers. That’s in comparison with 14.2% nationally and 12% amongst foremost metro regions withinside the Northeast, the latter of that’s progressed disproportionately through still-low numbers in Manhattan.

In fact, whilst Manhattan maintains to do especially nicely for workplace occupancy, so do a number of Boston’s internal neighborhoods, as a minimum in comparison with regions farther out. That can be a hallmark that the draw of Boston’s denser regions maintains throughout the pandemic.

Back Bay, which usually attracts the very best hire charges, had simply 8.6% of its area empty withinside the 1/3 sector, in line with Colliers. That turned into 1/2 of or much less of charges alongside Route 128 and beyond.

Recently, new rules have come into effect in Boston, with the goal of deterring corporate tax-saving “inversions.” An inversion is a way for companies to shift earnings and profits to foreign markets, thus lowering U.S. tax obligations. The question is, will those new rules hurt the biotech research sector in Boston?

Most experts say no, though there are a few that believe it will hurt the biotech sector.

Some believe that the new treasury rules are simply aiming to penalizing companies that are attempting to shift earnings to low-tax countries. This ensures that companies will continue to use tax avoidance strategies as influences to business decisions, which will make U.S. companies operating globally to not be as competitive as they could be, as well as not attracting as much investment as they could be.

Another viewpoint that believes the new rules will negatively impact biotech companies say that even if the biotech companies don’t currently use inversion tactics, the Treasury Department’s rules will reduce the potential value of inversions, leaving companies less profitable in the long run. This could make the biotech and pharmaceutical companies less competitive than similar companies in foreign settings.

However, many people do not believe the new rules will make a major impact. The biggest reason cited is that many of the Boston biotech companies are more focused on research, product development and drug trials, as opposed to product sales and income growth. As a result, much of the work done by

Boston biotech companies is pre-revenue, making the need for inversion much smaller, meaning that there is no significant impact to the biotech companies in the area. These types of accounting tactics are typically made my very large drug companies, which does not necessarily fit the profile of most of Boston’s biotech firms.

Other experts say that even if these new rules hurt local biotech companies, it is still good for Boston as a whole. Corporate tax inversions typically come from a large company buying a small foreign company and then moving the headquarters overseas to reduce U.S. tax burdens. This can be seen as an exploitation of the tax codes, which hurts the local economy and local governments. Thus, even if it did hurt the Boston biotech companies’ bottom’s lines a bit, it would still be a net positive for the economy as a whole.

Photo Credit: Umberto Salvagnin